A Guild divided.

Wow... So, this apparently happened a little while ago. Guild Wars has separated it's skills changes into PvE (player vs environment) and PvP (player vs player). To those who know nothing about Guild Wars, let me explain.

Guild Wars has a level cap of 20. It is pretty easy to get to level 20, but that's not where you truly gain your power. You gain your power from skills. And there are a lot of them. The best way to think of these skills is like a card game. You get skills from quests, buying them, and by buying "capture signets" that allow you to get skills from dead bosses. This is also how you get Elite skills, which are very powerful. Think of this as adding a card to your deck.

Unlike Wow and many other MMOs, you can only equip eight skills at one time. Think of this as the cards in your hand. When you are in towns and outposts, you are surrounded by your peers. Here you buy, sell, chat, celebrate holidays, join into parties to do missions, farm, quests, and whatever else. As soon as you leave these areas, you are in an "instance" where only your party exists. So it is now the party versus the monsters and you can no longer swap out cards, you can only play the cards in your hand. You are limited to only equipping one Elite card before you leave a town.

Now that I explained it, and hopefully I made it clear enough to understand, I will no longer refer skills as cards.

Previously, these skill balance were an ongoing trial and error process. Some skills were introduced to overcome extremely powerful monsters and bosses. The problem was that these skills were exploited by players in PvP to unfairly quash their opponents. This is a severe problem because PvP isn't just for shits and giggles. Well, not to some people. There are tournaments, both regional (North America, Korea, etc) and national where people earnestly compete for virtual and real world prizes, which includes money.

Naturally, this made things difficult. Skill changes affected the entire game. By separating the skill changes into PvP and PvE changes, you can now have skills more tailored to how they should be in the different game modes. This means that if a skill is slightly over powered, that's okay to leave it in PvE, but maybe tweak it to be more balanced in PvP. It also means that nerfs for either perspective of gameplay do not adversely affect the other.

The common complaint seems to be, "oh noes! Now I have to read more about teh Guild Wars!" If this is best people can come up with to complain about, then praise Ao. Yeah, I admit it is going to be a pain for those of us that do both PvP and PvE to remember what skills do what and so on, but the nice thing is that PvE can work towards getting locked in while PvP can still be kept fresh via various tweaks. I see this as an absolute win/win situation. Besides, you can save skill sets on templates. The complaint of it being harder to keep up with skill changes is relevant, but considering the great gain in gameplay, is entirely forgivable. Also, isn't this how Guild Wars 2 is purported to work?

GG ANet. GG.